The Rich Are Different

by Susan Howatch

  “An inspired judgment!” drawled Clay. “Just what the hell are you leading up to?”

  O’Reilly flicked the sweat from his forehead and plowed on. I could tell what rough going it was because I was sitting behind him and could see his hands clenching and unclenching behind his back.

  “Krasnov came to see me yesterday afternoon,” he said. “It was late—about a quarter of six. He asked for me at the front entrance and they sent an office boy up to my room. I went down. My first reaction was to get him out of the building, but he said he had some information about the parade, so I took him up to my office. It then turned out he had no information but just wanted me to get him a job. Bruce had evidently exaggerated the importance of my position at Van Zale’s. When I said it was impossible for me to get a job in the bank for a known Bolshevik, he tried to tell me he was no longer a Communist, but of course I didn’t believe a word of it. The man was obviously unbalanced. I got him out of my office at last and took him downstairs to the back lobby. Then I opened the doors into the great hall, said, “That’s the way out,’ and left him. I was expecting an important call from Chicago at six and I wanted to get back to my desk. I realize now I should never have left him, but—”

  “Disgraceful!” thundered Lewis and Walter together.

  “Jesus Christ!” snorted Clay.

  “Wait a minute,” said Martin. “The doorman in the front lobby must have recorded Krasnov’s entry into the building. Why did no one realize he hadn’t left?”

  “They did.” O’Reilly’s hands tightened behind his back again. “The doorman went off duty at six. At six-twenty, when I finished my call from Chicago, the night watchman sent someone up to check if Krasnov was still with me and I said he’d gone. It seemed obvious to me that Krasnov had left when everyone was leaving the building at six and hadn’t bothered to sign himself out I never thought twice about it at the time.”

  “Well, it’s easy to see now what happened,” said Charley heavily. “Krasnov hid himself somewhere—perhaps in that broom closet by the stairs—and later when the coast was clear he slipped into the drawing-room half of Paul’s office. I understand a map of the ground floor was found in his pocket. He would have had to hide again when the night watchman made his rounds, but there’s a coat closet in that far room and it would have been easy to lie low there.”

  There was a pause. O’Reilly had certainly come up with a story supporting the lone-assassin theory, and now if luck was running his way the Van Zale partners would gobble up his story in a frenzy of relief and prepare to convince the world there had been no conspiracy. Unfortunately luck wasn’t running all his way. I knew that Dinah and Paul had been in Paul’s office the previous night, and neither of them had noticed a stray anarchist soft-shoeing around looking for something to do.

  I clamped my mouth shut. Let the other partners believe him. Let them spread the word and save the bank. The bank had to come first. But when the danger was past I’d turn that conspiracy inside out and emerge top dog at Van Zale’s.

  I was just congratulating myself on my iron self-control when O’Reilly said outrageously in a meek little voice, “I’ll carry the memory of this mistake to my grave, I swear it, gentlemen. Mr. Van Zale was like a father to me.”

  I leaped to my feet. “You sonofabitch!” I shouted at him as they all jumped out of their skins with shock. “Get the hell out of here before I knock the shit out of you!”

  Of course everyone thought I had lost control because he hadn’t bothered to see Krasnov off the premises. None of them suspected him. He had been one of Paul’s people, a favored protégé. No one knew, as I knew, that he had wanted Paul’s wife.

  “Easy, Steve,” said Martin, grabbing my arm. “Get out,” said Clay to Terence. “Yes, leave us, O’Reilly,” said Charley. The ranks were closing. Someone opened the door. O’Reilly was put out, like a cat who had forgotten his house-training and made a mess. The door closed again. Charley poured me another cup of coffee. Lewis patted my shoulder with stagey sympathy. Clay offered me a cigarette.

  “Sorry about that, fellows,” I said when I had my stiff upper lip firmly back in place. “I know we all hate scenes. The truth is, I never could stand that guy Terence O’Reilly.”

  Someone made an Irish joke to cheer me up. We all exchanged thin Anglo-Saxon smiles. At last Lewis said in relief, “Well, at least we now have enough evidence to convince the public that Krasnov acted alone.”

  I began to fear for my self-control again. I got up at once. “Will you all excuse me for a moment?” I said. “I feel pretty beaten up and I’m going to have to lie down.”

  Everyone made sympathetic noises and I staggered along the corridor, shut myself in my room and reached automatically for my hip flask.

  After a while I began to think more clearly. After a longer while I felt bothered. Something wasn’t adding up. Somewhere along the line I’d missed a connection.

  I marshaled my thoughts as carefully as a snake charmer collecting friends from the snake pit. I was almost one hundred percent certain O’Reilly’s story was a lie, but why was a lie needed? How in hell had Krasnov got into the building?

  I considered O’Reilly’s story again, just to make sure I didn’t believe it, and the more I considered it the more implausible it became. The truth was there was no way O’Reilly could have guaranteed that Krasnov would remain undiscovered if he had stayed in the building overnight. The night watchman might well have called a guard to search the building when he found there was no evidence Krasnov had checked out. Krasnov might have skipped nimbly from closet to closet, but every time he moved he would be taking a risk. The night watchman or the guard made regular rounds. The cleaning women arrived soon after midnight and rattled around for a time. And someone might have been working unusually late or—like Paul and Dinah—visiting after hours. As a story explaining Krasnov’s presence in the building O’Reilly’s rigmarole was just about plausible, but as a plan of action guaranteeing that the assassin was in the right place at the right time it was riddled with the possibility of failure.

  I pretended I was O’Reilly evolving the perfect plan for getting Krasnov into the building, but I didn’t have to pretend hard, because of course there was only one way. I don’t know why I spent so long beating around the bush pretending I couldn’t think of it. Fear of facing the truth, probably.

  I swiveled in my chair and looked out the window. My room was directly above Paul’s office, and when I looked out I could see across the patio to the door in the wall, the bank’s back entrance into Willow Alley. There was no access to the building from the roof. The front was guarded night and day. The top of the high back wall was spiked and glassed and wired with the most elaborate alarms. The door, with its locks which would have driven even the best safecracker to suicide, was the only way Krasnov could have entered One Willow Street.

  I was O’Reilly again, pussyfooting around setting the scene. The night watchman on his first round would have turned on the burglar alarms covering the doors which opened from Paul’s office into the patio, but O’Reilly, pretending to work late, would have run down later to switch them off. No problem. Afterward O’Reilly would have gone home, briefed Krasnov for the last time and given him the keys of the Willow Alley door plus the key of the patio doors. Krasnov would have delayed entering the building for as long as possible but would probably have walked in while it was still dark and stashed himself in the drawing-room closet. Still no problem. But one problem was insurmountable. O’Reilly could never have had access to those keys. Only the partners were allowed to use the Willow Alley entrance and enter the building through Paul’s office, and only the partners had the keys which opened the door in the wall.

  I told myself O’Reilly must have had a set of keys himself when he was Paul’s personal assistant. There could be no other explanation. But I had to find out for sure. I had to know.

  “Get Terence O’Reilly down here,” I said to my secretary “I want to talk to him.”

/>   III

  He tippy-toed reluctantly into the room and paused about one inch past the threshold. “You wanted to see me, Steve?”

  “Yeah. Sorry I lost my temper just now. Take a seat. Drink?”

  “No, thanks.” He sat stiffly on the extreme edge of the client’s chair. His polish was worn and chipped, like crockery which has seen better days. His hard bright light eyes were dull with exhaustion. His mouth drooped sullenly.

  “Before you quit and wander off into the blue,” I said, “I’d like to fix a time when I can go over your files with you. I don’t expect that kid Herbert Mayers knows much, does he?”

  He hadn’t expected to discuss business. I saw him struggle to focus his thoughts. “Bart understands the filing system. He knows where everything is. Of course, there’s some hush stuff he doesn’t know about, but I can fill you in on that.”

  “Does Mayers know the safe combinations?”

  “Sure. You forget he’s had my old job for over a year.”

  “Does he have all the keys—all the keys I would expect you to have on your office key ring?”

  “All except the keys for my own file cabinets, but I’ll turn those in to you before I leave.”

  “Swell. By the way, do you have the keys to the Willow Alley entrance? I think I must have left mine out on the Island last weekend and it’s goddamned inconvenient trying to crash through all those ghouls at the front entrance.”

  “No, I never had any partners’ privileges,” he said bitterly without stopping to think. “You should know that better than anyone, Steve.”

  I wanted nothing better than to move at top speed away from the subject of the Willow Alley keys. Trying not to think of the implications of his denial, I said mildly, “What’s the big grudge?”

  “Well, we’re the same age, aren’t we? And we’re both Vat Zale protégés. I know you’re a smart guy, but I’m no fool either. Don’t you think we both should have ended up partners?”

  I was genuinely surprised. “It’s not my fault if Paul thought your brain was better suited to administration than to finance.”

  “Oh, I could have done just as well as you!” he spat at me, suddenly coming apart at the seams. “But just because your father ran through two million dollars of old money while my father was an immigrant who ran a hardware store—”

  “Oh, Christ!”

  “And just because my family were Catholics from Connaught while your family were Protestants from Ulster—”

  “We came from County Cork!” I yelled, although no one knew where the first Sullivan, had come from before he turned up fighting the British in the Hudson Valley. However I’d read somewhere once that Sullivan is a common name in the Irish southwest.

  The crazy slanging match went on and on. I’d had no idea O’Reilly had such a chip on his shoulder about being a first-generation Irish-American Catholic. Later I realized he was probably still smarting from the way he had been treated in Charley’s office when all the partners had pulled out their Yankee stops to put him in his place, but at the time I didn’t bother to analyze why he was so furious, because I was too busy welcoming the chance to let off steam. In the light of my private knowledge about the assassination I was having a hard time restraining myself from beating O’Reilly to bloody pulp, and his ethnic drivel, heavily laced with religious idiocies, was just the excuse I needed to lose my temper and roar obscenities at him.

  We never came to blows because we were too hot. We just sat gasping in our chairs until he muttered, “Fuck you!” and staggered out.

  Ten minutes later when I had cooled off, I remembered he had denied ever having had a set of keys for the Willow Alley door. I believed him too. His resentment in being refused such a partner’s privilege was all too obviously genuine.

  But somehow he had got hold of a set of keys. The whole phony explanation about Krasnov biding overnight in the building was to cover up the fact that someone had produced the keys for the Willow Alley door.

  Paul had had his keys with him that morning; Peterson had used them to let us into the building. My own keys had never left my possession.

  That left my five surviving partners, Charley, Lewis, Walter, Clay and Martin.

  I backed away in panic. That was the kind of disaster I’d never be able to keep under wraps. It would kill the bank, kill us all. If a partner was involved we were doomed.

  Finishing the rye in my hip flask, I put my head in my hands and in despair tried to figure out a way we could survive.

  IV

  My stomach finally rebelled against all the liquor I’d fed it, but after I was through with the men’s room I took some salts and felt I could cope again. My panic was gone. My mind was clear, so clear that it was easy for me to sit back in my chair and knock all my crazy suspicions squarely on the head.

  The truth was that shock and grief had temporarily sent me over the edge. Krasnov must have been stashed overnight in the bank after all. Of course that was a big risk to take, but life’s full of little risks if you’re bent on assassination, and it was just the assassins’ good luck that nothing fouled up their scheme. The idea of a partner being involved was so ludicrous that I actually laughed, and when my laughter sounded forced I reminded myself of a fact which as far as I could see was undeniable: none of the partners had had a motive. It was true that Charley, Lewis and I all coveted the senior partner’s chair, but we were hardly going to knock Paul off in order to get it; this might be Jimmy Walker’s New York but it wasn’t the Wild West, and investment bankers just didn’t do that kind of thing. Also it was no use thinking that Jay’s men—Charley, Lewis and old Walter—might have plotted to kill Paul in belated revenge for Jay’s death, because the point about these three was that they had always got along better with Paul than with Jay. That was why they had stayed in the firm. Anyway, respectable investment bankers didn’t go around murdering for revenge like a bunch of Chicago hoods.

  I picked over a couple of other motives. It was true we all stood to gain financially, from Paul’s death because his fifty-percent share of the profits would now be redistributed when we re-formed the partnership, but we were all rich men already. You didn’t become a Van Zale partner and then find you were wondering where the next penny was coming from, so it was no use theorizing that Paul had been killed for his money.

  The only other motive I could dream up involved some unknown eternal triangle, but even that seemed farfetched. Paul had seduced countless wives, but he was always careful that the husband was either complaisant or indifferent, and as a matter of common sense he tended to avoid running after the wives of his partners. I won’t say he didn’t do it. I knew he had slept with Lewis’ wife a couple of times, but that was only because the wife had almost raped him, and Lewis had wanted a divorce at the time anyway. I couldn’t seriously imagine Lewis feeling murderous on account of that incident, and even assuming he did I found it even harder to imagine him sitting down with that gangster Greg Da Costa, that carpetbagger Terence O’Reilly and that Bolshevik Bruce Clayton to hash out an assassination scheme. Lewis, the archcapitalist, was just too much of a snob to associate with such people.

  I glanced at my watch. It was three o’clock, I had had no lunch and I knew my partners would be needing my help, but before I left the room I glanced at the outdoor thermometer that stood in eternal shade on the window ledge which faced north. The mercury was glued at ninety-seven degrees.

  Sometime that evening I dragged myself back to my apartment in the East Sixties. I felt limp, blank and about a hundred years old.

  “Steven!” cried my wife, scooping me into the apartment and flinging her arms around me purposefully. “You poor lamb, you must be so upset, what a dreadful thing to happen, why the hell didn’t you return my calls? No, don’t say a word, I quite understand, come on in and sit down, you poor poor darling, I’ll fix you a drink.”

  I slumped on the couch. I liked it when Caroline made a big fuss over me. It didn’t happen often.

  �
�I got here this afternoon and found Dinah encamped. You know, Steven, I think we got that girl wrong. I think she really cared for Paul, it wasn’t just the money and the glamour. She was in such a state I took her down to the ship myself to make sure she got the right one, and she was really quite warm when she thanked me, I almost forgot she was English. That little boy’s so cute—quite like Paul too, I only hope he doesn’t start having epileptic fits. Now, you poor lamb, drink this up and tell me the whole story. Is it really true Bruce Clayton went berserk with a hatchet and ran through the main hall carving everyone up?”

  “Oh my God,” I said in disgust, and roused myself to give her a heavily censored version of the facts.

  “Steven,” said Caroline sternly when I’d finished, “are you being entirely truthful with me?”

  “Hell, yes!” I suddenly didn’t want to talk anymore. I just wanted to switch off my mind and forget. Caroline’s thigh looked up at me invitingly beneath the skimpy folds of her frock.

  “Oh no!” she said at once as I slid a hand upward from her knee. “Not until you’ve told me the whole story!”

  “God damn it, Cal, give a guy a break, can’t you?”

  “Can’t we ever conduct a conversation which doesn’t end with you suggesting I lie on my back with my legs apart and my mouth shut?”

  I groaned. “Jesus, why did I ever marry a woman like you?”

  “Paul told you to,” she said. “Remember?” She stroked the back of my neck efficiently. “And damn it, it was good advice. … Steve, I’m terribly sorry about Paul, I really am—I know how you must feel. Was it a conspiracy?”

  “Nope.”

  “Are you going to be senior partner?”

  “Yep.”

  “Darling!” cried Caroline before I could add the words, “But not yet.” And she began to roll down her stockings.

  Thanks to her tank-sized martini, the coup de grace after a day’s drinking, I was damned-near impotent, but Caroline had great technical competence and we did achieve some kind of coupling before I passed out.